The Worst Witch 2017 - The Monopoly Game
by the stargate time traveller
Summary: Set in Hallow Sisters On My Mind's "Permanent Mother's" world, Esmerelda takes Ethel and Sybil to the Hubbles for a nice dinner, as good neighbours. When the Hubbles bring out a simple game of Monopoly, what can go wrong?


I don't own The Worst Witch or the characters. A little present to my friend Hallow Sisters on My Mind.

* * *

The Monopoly Game.

"Why must we go to _their_ flat?" Ethel asked her exasperated older sister and eye-rolling younger sister who were both helping her move slowly to the lift that would take down to the Hubble flat. Her injuries were recovering slowly, but Ethel still had problems moving, and both of her sisters were patient as she moved to the lift.

"They invited us, and don't forget Julie has given us a lot of help recently, and so has Mildred," Esmerelda reminded her briefly before she gave her sister both barrels in the hope she would stop. "In any case, her testimony helped our court case."

Sybil shuddered. "Please don't talk about that court case," she begged, looking at her sister scared. "I thought that guy was going to get us sent back to them, even after what they did to us."

Esme winced. "Sorry, Sybie," she apologised sincerely as they got into the lift, but before she could say what else was on her mind, Ethel was moaning again.

"I hate these lifts," she groused, looking at them with disdain.

"I like them," Sybil said with a smile, happy they were no longer talking about the court case which could have seen them sent back to their abusive family, though she did wonder why their solicitor hadn't made it known what their parents had done only a few weeks ago since it would have shattered the other man's case like a spell smashing glass.

"Why?" Ethel asked her sister quizzically.

"They go up and down!" Sybil grinned like a child, making Ethel roll her eyes while Esmerelda chuckled. Sybil's smile faded a little bit. "What did I do?" she asked, looking confused.

Esme snorted with laughter. "Nothing Sybie," she replied, but then she remembered what she was going to say earlier. "But don't forget we're going down because Julie did help us, and she pointed out I wasn't abusing you, as she would have noticed even if she isn't a witch."

Ethel looked down, admitting that her sister did have a point there. It was the school holidays and Ethel was just relieved to be allowed to be with her sisters 24/7 without needing to be transferred back and forth between Cackles and the flat. But Esmerelda was right, Julie Hubble had helped during the court case, and if she hadn't been there then they might not have gotten out of being sent back. She did wonder why the case of her parents kidnapping them hadn't been brought up much earlier during the trial. It would have savaged that ridiculous witness statement where that clearly fake testimony of Esmerelda abusing Ethel in public into little bits, and yet it hadn't. She could not help but wonder if their solicitor had allowed his opponent to feel like he was in the clear, that he was going to win… only to bring them down when it was too late for them to do anything. If that was the case then Ethel really did not want to be on the receiving end in a case with him on the other side.

But the Hubble's…

Yes, Julie had been brilliant when she had babysat her and Sybil, but did she really want to be with her school nemesis? Ethel's feelings towards Mildred were not as clear-cut as many people imagined. Many felt she disliked Mildred, but Ethel didn't. In many ways, Ethel envied the other girl, although many of the reasons were irrelevant now given how Esmerelda had saved her and Sybil from hell. And yet… And yet, Mildred had done some things to her.

Cheating on the exam. The Spelling Bee. Taking away her chance to be a hero during that Founding Stone mess, but at the same time, she remembered how Mildred had told her that story of how she herself had been injured. Since then, Mildred had gone out of her way to make Ethel feel as comfortable as possible in the school when the other students were making her life hell, and Hardbroom and Cackle were not helping either.

_I hope I never have to see those two, but Merlin only knows what they would have said during the trial, _she thought, grimacing at the idea; knowing Cackle and Hardbroom, they would have stated something really stupid, not once remembering their own part in the kidnapping…

At last, they found themselves at the Hubble flat. Esmerelda knocked on the door. Very quickly the door was pulled open, and Mildred was on the other side. The other girl was dressed in her own clothes, a t-shirt and trousers, but her hair was out of the pigtails she usually wore at school, her long dark hair was done up into two braids hanging on both sides of her face.

Mildred greeted them with a smile, "Hi."

"Hello, Mildred," Esmerelda smiled back politely to the younger girl.

"Hi, Mildred!" Sybil grinned at her friend.

Ethel said nothing.

Esmerelda sighed inwardly, determined this whole thing was not going to be a problem tonight. She nudged her sister, cursing her for being this stubborn.

Ethel glared at Mildred. "Mildred Hubble," she greeted. It was the closest she could get to a proper greeting.

Esme mentally facepalmed.

"Hello to you and all," Mildred replied with a sigh, but it didn't look like she was that offended, but Esmerelda could see the rebuff had slightly upset the brunette. "Anyway, come on in."

The Hallow sisters had been in Mildred's flat before but that visit had been too brief for them to get an eye of the place and as they looked around they noticed that, like their own flat, this flat was clearly well-loved by the Hubbles. Ethel's eyes found the photographs Julie had used to chronicle Mildred's life, and she chuckled when she saw a few of them from where she was, and she made a mental note to take a look at them later.

Julie appeared from the kitchen. "Hello, girls. Dinner will be ready in half an hour. Make yourselves at home."

"Thanks, Julie," Esmerelda nodded with a smile, sniffing the air. She could tell that Julie was cooking bolognese or something like that, but that wasn't a surprise since she had told the older woman of her sisters likes and dislikes when it came to meals. The older girl went into the kitchen to speak to Julie but not before she told her sisters to sit down and relax.

Ethel did so, but only with Sybil's help. But while the middle sister was being helped by her younger sister, Ethel was looking around the flat briefly before she sat down on the sofa where Mildred was, sitting in front of the TV which was currently turned off. On the coffee table were a sketchbook and a number of pencils. Mildred had been in the middle of drawing something, though what it was Ethel had no idea. She didn't really care either, art was not something that came naturally to her and she had long since not bothered to learn anything about it. That was why Mildred had the telly off, she needed to concentrate.

But Sybil was looking at the drawing-that-had-not-been started with interest. She could see that Mildred had drawn a number of shapes, but what the older girl planned to draw was beyond her comprehension. "What are you drawing?" she asked curiously.

Mildred spared Sybil with a glance before she picked up another pencil. She pointed to a couple of pictures laid out on the table in front of her quietly while she focused on the drawing. Sybil leaned over to take a look, and despite herself Ethel had to lean forward as well, ignoring the pain as she shifted from where she was sitting.

On the table were a few pictures, photographs, of a coral reef. Some of the pictures showed the water surrounding the life-rich world of the coral as a dark, vivid blue, highlighting the textures of the coral while schools of fish of all colours swam peacefully around it. Ethel and Sybil had watched enough nature documentaries over the last few months to see that coral reefs were beautiful places, animated and full of life.

So why wasn't Mildred drawing the reef out how it was?

And then Ethel realised that she was. She was lightly tracing over a series of uneven lines on the paper on top of the straight shapes she had neatly drawn out earlier, and she was filling in details of the coral by glancing once or twice at the photographs to give her inspiration or insight into how they should be drawn. Ethel had never seen drawing like this - she had assumed you just grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil, and just drew. It had never occurred to her honestly you could draw like this.

Apparently, it had also never occurred to Sybil either. "I wish I could draw like you," she said to Mildred, her tone envious.

Mildred stopped her drawing and smiled at the younger girl. "Oh, but you can," she said kindly. "Everyone can draw."

Ethel looked away. "We can't," she said curtly, though the reason for her curtness was because she and her sisters had never really found the time, and it was too late.

Mildred ignored the curtness in Ethel's voice. "You can, Ethel," she insisted. "There are two ways you can draw; the first way is simple, you just draw, and you make mistakes. You rush the whole thing and you get everything wrong, and you miss details as you draw, or you see them but you get them wrong." Mildred paused but she carried on when she saw for herself that both Hallow girls were hanging onto her every word. Emboldened by this, she carried on. "The second technique is easy; you take your canvas - this piece of paper - and you draw shapes that are a template for the real drawing. You want to draw a city - use rectangular and square shapes, to characterise more than one building to make room for the whole picture. You want to draw a cat, use shapes to pick out the cat's head, the tail, body, the paws and the ears. Once you've got the shapes together, you can begin the drawing. The best thing about this type of drawing technique is you can draw what you want, filling in the details as you go, and the shapes can help you with the scale of how large or small those details are."

Ethel tried to rerun what Mildred had said, but she wasn't sure if the brunette haired girl was only saying all of that because she wanted to sound impressive, or if she was actually making sense only to herself.

"Do either of you want to try?" Mildred smiled invitingly to both sisters.

Sybil bit her lip, but then she brightened up considerably. "I do!"

Mildred grinned and she tore out a piece of paper from her sketchbook and handed them both to the younger girl who took them eagerly, and then the brunette showed Sybil the glass of water she'd been drinking and she placed it next to the apples and bananas in the bowl. "This drawing is gonna be both easy and challenging. It's okay," she said quickly when she saw Sybil's visible reaction to the word challenging, "it will be okay…."

Her own drawing abandoned, Mildred spent the next few minutes helping Sybil with her drawing while Ethel watched quietly. She had been tempted herself with taking some paper and a pencil, and just use the technique Mildred had described, but she was too comfortable where she was and she didn't want to go through the painful and slow process of moving over the sofa, get comfortable once more, and then having to get up just to get to the dinner table.

* * *

Dinner was a lovely lasagna that had been cooked to perfection, and as she tucked into the meal, Ethel's mouth practically drooled as she once more ate Julie's cooking. She had been reluctant to eat the meal she had brought with her to the hospital shortly after Ethel had her accident, but one bite and she had found she had a liking for Julie Hubble's cooking.

After the lasagna and the chocolate cake that Julie had made for pudding, something which had delighted Ethel no end, the group went back into the living room and they began to play a game of monopoly. The moment the offer was made Ethel and Esmerelda were instantly enthusiastic while Sybil was just beaming from happiness.

The Hallow sisters had their own monopoly game. It was just one of many games the non-magical world possessed which had been copied by the magical world. The sisters had once had such a game of their own, but when they had left their parents' abusive care, they had left behind a lot of things so they had needed to get substitutes. Moving into the non-magical world had made it impossible for them to bring all of their witching paraphernalia, and the code forbade any magical item from being seen, so they had needed to make do with what they had.

Granted, it had taken a while for the three blonde sisters to get used to the fact there was no magic in the game, but it didn't matter after a while since the principles of the game were good enough even though the figures of the game had to be moved by hand, and not by magic.

It didn't take long for the girls to really get cracking.

Mildred groaned out loud when she had to give up £100 to Sybil.

Surprisingly and uncharacteristically for the small blonde sister who was usually so insecure and anxious, Sybil was smug this time, "YES, YOU LOSE!" she gloated.

Out of the corner of Mildred's eye, she could see Ethel's smug smirk aimed in her direction; she might clearly want to bring her school nemesis down, but that didn't mean she couldn't be happy one of her sisters could do it as well. Mildred just huffed and muttered under her breath, surprised by how competitive the girls were, "Hallows."

It never failed to amaze her how competitive they were.

Unfortunately, she was not quiet enough.

"What was that, Mildred Hubble?" Esmerelda asked, amazing Mildred again; she would have expected that from Ethel, not Esmerelda.

All three of the Hallow girls glared at her.

Back peddling in fear at the glares which were really scary; Esmerelda's was much stronger than Ethel's, who glared quite a lot, and even Sybil's was intimidating.

"N…nothing," Mildred said, making her mother roll her eyes, "I-I said…mallows…," she trailed off, knowing she sounded incredibly stupid, but there was nothing she could do about it. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her mother snicker. Thanks,_ mum, _she thought betrayed. But sisters...

It was a lame excuse and the Hallow sisters knew it. They didn't believe her and she knew that as well. But luckily the three girls seemed more interested in the game they were playing so they decided to just let it go. They just glared at her for a little bit more before Ethel reached for the dice, picked them up, and rolled.

Ethel moved four spaces. "I want to buy that property please."

"NO!" Mildred and Julie were nearly blown off from where they were sitting when Esmerelda let out what could only be described as a cross between a shriek from a banshee and the howl of a cat. It was one of Esmerelda's properties, and it was obvious the elder sister was not happy.

But Ethel was firm. "Hand it over, Esme," she demanded and held out her hand.

Esmerelda was not above giving out emotional guilt trips. "I took you in under the goodness of my heart, and now you want one of my properties? No chance!" she glared furiously at Ethel, who just glared back.

"Sometimes," Ethel said, "you have to hand something over."

Mildred was astonished by just how far the sisters were willing to go especially emotional blackmail to win a game, and she wondered if it was another Hallow thing.

"No way! You have to pay me for landing there," Esme went on, grasping at straws even if they were against the rules, and Mildred wondered whether the Hallow sisters fought like this a lot since they had said they had their own game in their flat played out like this, but she was willing to bet that they did. "I am not selling!" Esme glared at her sister insistently.

Ethel just glared back, glaring at her so furiously Mildred was sure if the elder girl was a metal sculpture it would be melting by how hot it was. Mildred also noted that Sybil was slightly taken aback - not much, but taken aback - as she prepared for her own move.

Julie stepped in to play peacemaker - Mildred felt her mother was extremely brave to step in. "Can we follow the actual rules, please, girls?" she asked without any fear or hesitation.

The two fighting girls glared at her.

"And no glaring!" Julie said, clearly trying not to swallow at the double glare.

Esme and Ethel glared a little bit more, but Esme huffed a little bit and reluctantly gave what Ethel what she wanted before she pouted at losing a property.

"No pouting or huffing, please," Julie went on, "this is supposed to be a nice game between us. Can we please move on?"

Sybil picked up the dice, determined to just get on with the game. She rolled the dice, truly excited it was her move.

"Yes!" she clapped in an adorable manner as she moved her piece a few paces, and it looked like she was getting what she wanted. "Yes!" she cheered once more, clapping her hands. "At last! Esme, please give me £200 please?"

To the astonishment of the Hubbles, Sybil actually pushed out her lips a little bit to pout adorably to add to the cute effect and make her sister cave in to her demands.

Mildred gaped at the girl, amazed by her tactics.

But Esme was not amazed. She was annoyed. "What?" she cried and examined the board feverishly. "No, there must be some mistake, something wrong with the board….," she went on.

Sybil lost her pout, but she did not put her hand down. "Esme, the board is not broken. I have made my move. Please, can I have my money now? I need to count it."

Mildred gaped at the girl again.

Esme sighed and just handed over the cash where Sybil did as she said, she counted it.

Sybil cheered when she found that her sister had given her the right amount - Mildred idly wondered what she would have done if she hadn't, would she have thrown a tantrum? Or would she have done what Ethel had done? Either way, Mildred was glad that Esme had not tried to cheat her sister - and she even jumped up and down from where she was sitting. "Yes!"

Mildred and Julie shared another look with each other, both perplexed by the Hallow sisters.

"What's that look for?" Ethel asked curiously and more than a little bit suspiciously.

"Nothing!" Mildred said innocently.

In the same tone, Julie said, "We like looking at each other, after all, we are mother and daughter, or daughter and mother."

_Not helping, mum, _Mildred thought to herself, but she said, "As you do with your own sisters."

The Hallow sisters looked at them probingly, then they looked at each other and seemed to be communicating without words before they looked back at their hosts. Finally, Sybil shrugged, "Okay, if you say so."

"It's your move, Mildred," Julie said.

Mildred took the dice and prepared to roll. She hoped that she got something good, really good. She needed to find something, get something, to really defeat the Hallow sisters. Hopefully, she would get a property off of Ethel or Sybil, though god knew what Esme would do if she demanded ether money or even a property.

Ethel smirked, "I am looking forward to getting your money, Mildred Hubble."

Mildred ignored the blonde sister as she rolled the dice in her hand even harder. She knew the blonde sister was just trying to psych her.

But Mildred had underestimated Ethel's capacities for psychological warfare. "How would you feel about being in jail, Mildred Hubble?"

Mildred had had enough and she rolled the dice. She moved a few paces…. and landed her piece straight onto a space Ethel owned.

The brunette could not resist it - she laughed at the poetry there. "Justice!" she crowed.

Unfortunately, Ethel was looking at the space with a faraway look in her eye. Sybil and Esme shared a fearful look and they subtly pulled away. "YOU CHEAT!' Ethel shouted.

"How am I cheat?!" Mildred retorted, recovering from the yell. "It was just a roll of the dice, you saw me."

"You must have used magic," Ethel was clearly grasping for straws, but it held as much water as a sieve.

"You are joking, Ethel," Mildred rolled her eyes, "I haven't treated. I did not use magic. It was a roll of the dice."

"I'm not paying!" Ethel folded her arms.

Esme sighed, "Ethel, please-."

"No!"

"If you don't play," Sybil stated logically, "we can't finish, and who knows Ethel, you might win. Does it really matter if you do?"

Ethel looked thoughtful in the face of her younger sister's argument.

"Please, Ethel," Julie said.

Ethel picked up the money, and handed it over to Mildred.

"Thanks, Ethel," Mildred said gratefully.

Ethel huffed. "I will get that back, Mildred Hubble," she said.

Mildred wisely decided not to say a word, thinking it was best not to anger the blonde more.

Esme was the next one to roll the dice, and she laughed when Julie had to give her some money, but the smile faded somewhat when with an eyeball just handed it over without argument. Esmerelda laughed again, but Julie just grumbled and rolled her eyes at the gloating teenager. Mildred knew how her mother felt, but she had worked out enough to know the sisters loved winning more than losing.

"I'm going to win!" the elder Hallow girl gloated, her eyes glinting.

"No, I will," Ethel glared at her sister hotly."

Sybil said nothing, but it was clear to the Hubble's she was counting her chances.

* * *

In the end, it was Esmerelda who won the game, much to the annoyance of the other sisters.

"No!" Sybil cried, looking distraught that she hadn't won the game.

"I wanted to win!" Ethel pouted, and she glared at Sybil. "This is all your fault, Sybil."

"How is this my fault?" Sybil glared back.

Mildred and Julie shared another look, both promising never to play this game with the Hallow sisters again anytime soon.


End file.
